Caffeine. Whiskey. Code. Mostly the last one.

Automating Appcelerator: grunt-titanium and grunt-alloy

If you follow me on twitter, my current love affair with task management via the node.js module grunt is no secret. Long story short, it is a deliciously simple way to automate development tasks, with a multitude of those tasks (like linting, minification, file watching, etc…) already done for you. I could babble on about it here, but I think a tweet of mine best encapsulates my experience with it.

I love @gruntjs. I now officially spend next to no time on shit that isn’t integral to the user-facing functionality of my projects.

In a natural fusion of my current technological entanglements, I took to creating grunt task plugins for Appcelerator’s core cross-platform mobile development tools. As a result, we now have grunt-titanium for the Titanium CLI and grunt-alloy for the Alloy MVC framework. With these plugins you can now automate all functionality involved by these 2 tools, in turn letting you shift your focus onto your mobile app development, where it should be.

Titanium and Alloy, check out Appcelerator’s guides and get to building top-of-the-line, cross-platform, native mobile apps quickly and easily.

In the meantime, though, check out these few examples of how you can use grunt-titanium and grunt-alloy to super-charge your development workflow. Bear in mind that these are excerpts from a Gruntfile.js implementation, so again, read up on grunt and check out the grunt-titanium and grunt-alloy repos to fully understand how to use these examples.